I mean, you DO have to wonder sometimes how people get the jobs they have:
It’s the kind of spat that flares thousands of times a day in schools all over the country.
But at Public School 34 in Queens Village, Assistant Principal Nancy Miller’s ghastly way of handling a minor scuffle between two Haitian fourth-graders has sparked fury.
According to parents and students, Miller, who is white, chose to punish all 13 Haitian pupils in the school’s only fourth-grade bilingual class – even though just two were involved in the March 16 incident.
She ordered all 13 to sit on the cafeteria floor, then made them use their fingers to eat their lunch of chicken and rice, while all the other students watched.
“In Haiti, they treat you like animals, and I will treat you the same way here,” several students recalled Miller saying.
Some of the punished fourth-graders were so humiliated they began to cry. A few begged Miller for spoons to eat.
And, of course, there’s the inevitable probe and demands that she be fired. MORE:
One of those punished was Woosvelt Isac. His father, Sony Isac, noticed the boy was upset that night.
“He was almost crying,” Isac said yesterday. “I asked him what was wrong. Then he told me, ‘They put me sitting on the floor. They put me to eat with my hands.’ I couldn’t believe it.”
At the suggestion of a teacher, several children wrote their accounts of the incident that afternoon in their bilingual class.
This is what one child wrote:
“Mrs. Miller made me and our classmates sit on the floor to eat our lunch. She said that we are animals and we got it from our country. … I was hurt, and when I got to my class I told my teacher about what happened. I did not like what she said about my country.”
Isac and other parents complained to the principal, Pauline Shakespeare. They claim that Shakespeare, who is black, tried to cover for Miller.
They also claim school officials tried to bribe the kids with ice cream to deny the incident happened!
Hey, don’t give Tom DeLay any ideas…
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.